This toolkit is for those that are ready to get into the nitty-gritty details of changing the food on campus. This toolkit should be started after the Food Service Overview and may be done at the same time as the Supply Chain Assessment! By the end of this toolkit, you’ll understand how big food service providers and distributors work. It will provide you with ideas and processes for how you can work together. You’ll also have some clear opportunities to get more local and sustainable food onto your campus.

1. PURCHASING
BASELINE
TOOLKIT
This toolkit is for those that are
ready to get into the nitty-gritty details of
changing where food on campus is coming from
and how it is being produced. This toolkit should be
started after the Food Service Overview and may be
done at the same time as the Supply Chain Assessment!
By the end of this toolkit, you’ll understand how big food
service providers and distributors work. You’ll also have some clear
opportunities to get more local and sustainable food onto your campus.

2. Applied Student Research Toolkit 2
The Campus Food Systems Project builds the student movement to
get healthy, local sustainable food onto university campuses in Canada. The CFSP
launched in October 2011 to work with campuses across the country. The project
aims to help students improve the multi-stakeholder organizing, procurement
practices, and research capacity of their institutions. By doing so, students have
unlocked the potential for Universities to lead the healthy, local and sustainable
food movement.
The resources used, best practices developed, and lessons learned from these
campuses are shared on studentfood.ca to inspire and support change on
campuses nationwide.
This project was developed by Sierra Youth Coalition and Meal Exchange, two
national organizations with over 20 years of experience bringing students, faculty
and administration together on university campuses to deliver social justice
and environmental programs. The partnership of our organizations on this
initiative was supported by three years of funding from the J.W. McConnell Family
Foundation.
For questions or further support, contact national@studentfood.ca
Sierra Youth Coalition
1 Nicholas, Suite 1510-1
K1N 7B7
Ottawa, ON
(613) 241-1615
syc-cjs.org
Meal Exchange
365-401 Richmond Street
M5V 3A8
Toronto, ON
(416) 657-4489
www.mealexchange.com
This toolkit was last updated May 2014.
This work is license under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
To view a copy at this license, visit: http//:creativecommons.org/license/by-nc-nc/3.0/

3. Applied Student Research Toolkit 3
Introduction and Goals
The Idea
This toolkit will help you to continue building a healthy, just and sustainable food system on your
campus. The Purchasing Baseline Assessment, also referred to as a Purchasing or Procurement Audit,
is a tool to help you determine where the food on your campus is coming from now.
Once you have this information, you, your food services team, other students and stakeholders can
determine how your campus can make changes to improve food purchasing. These changes can help
to support the social, ecological and economic goals of your community.
This toolkit is meant to be used after the completing the Food Service Overview, which provides the
groundwork for understanding the specifics of how food service providers on your campus are generally
purchasing food. The Purchasing Baseline Assessment will support you to discuss the specifics about
what’s actually being purchased and how improvements towards more local and sustainable options
can be made.
What’s in this Toolkit
• Suggestions on how to approach and work with your campus food
service team: Questions to guide your conversations and processes
• A Guide to finding solutions: Ideas of how to tie this into your
campus food movement
• Examples and best practices from other institutions: Background
reading including guides, case studies, and examples of
Purchasing Baseline Assessments

4. Applied Student Research Toolkit 4
The Purchasing Baseline Assessment Process
1. Set a goal
Before beginning a purchasing baseline assessment, it is important to define what you’d like to
achieve from this process. This could be decided by students, a multi-stakeholder group, or in
collaboration with food services.
Example Goal: “We want to know the percentage of local, sustainable and just food products our
campus is purchasing (starting with milk, eggs, and produce). The purchasing baseline assessment
will identify gaps in our knowledge and help our campus set targets to improve our food system in
the future.”
2. Determine scope, priorities and process
There is a lot of information that can be explored in a purchasing baseline assessment. Here
are important questions to guide you in determining your scope:
• Who will be involved in this process? What are their roles?
• Who will be leading this audit?
• What products will you be looking into?
• Do you have a predetermined definition of local, sustainable or just?
• What is the estimated timeline?
You can ask these questions with your food service team and other stakeholders to help guide your
process!
Hint: Most dining halls already order some local products all year (e.g. milk,
eggs) and some others when it’s cheap (e.g. local produce). Start by asking
your food service team what they know they are already buying local and how to
promote that. This can both be a good way to build interest and trust with your
food service provider, and to raise awareness about local food on campus. Then
you can move onto some of the tougher questions and areas of uncertainty.

5. Applied Student Research Toolkit 5
3. Gather information
You’ll need to work with your food service team to access invoices to start identifying what purchases
are local, which purchases have certifications and where there are information gaps. This is a time
to collect product and contact information on the foods you want to audit, including prices, SKUs and
volumes.
As you’re collecting data, it will be useful to organize it in a database or spreadsheet. It will be important
to note what information you find or gaps you encourage. In areas where there is uncertainty (i.e. we
don’t know where any of our flours or oats come from), you will likely need to work with your food
service provider to speak to your distributors or suppliers to find out more information about such
products.
It’s important to gather information (invoices) from two periods of the year (e.g.. Fall and Spring) to
have a yearly average that reflects more than one season’s purchasing.

6. Applied Student Research Toolkit 6
For tips on how to gather,
organize, and analyze
information, scroll down to The
Approach and Questions to
Consider sections
4. Organize and Analyze
Now it is time to determine how much information you have
and what unknown gaps remain. After speaking with both
your food service providers and distributors, you should
have an idea of what information is challenging to obtain
and why, what information you will be able to obtain, and
what information is easy to track. Of the information you
can retrieve, can you determine how many dollars (and
what %) are spent on local food, and on products that have
ecological, animal welfare, or work rights certifications?
5. Integrate
Your next step is integrating this knowledge, or these knowledge gaps, with your other
work. Remember, you have a whole team of student researchers, professors and food
service staff to collaborate on this project.
You can work with your team on creating Applied Student Research Projects to start
filling knowledge gaps:
You can also use the Supply Chain Assessment Toolkit to help determine what local and sustainable
food your campus can purchase. Here is a guide to help your food service team integrate more local
food into their operations and servings.
McGill Food Systems Project – Farm to Plate
This report is an overview of what they found out about how food services, and food purchasing
specifically, work at McGill. This short case-study is a useful example of what students on that
campus found out when they set out to do a purchasing baseline on their campus. You can
also watch the neat Food is Important video.
For example Students at UBC did a specific triple-bottom line analysis of Sugar and found that
10% of their sugar was coming from local sugar-beet sources. Moreover, they looked into how
recipes could be made with ingredients such as local BC Apples in place of Sugar. Read more
here.

7. Applied Student Research Toolkit 7
Take a Solutions Based Approach: When you see roadblocks ahead, take the time to think
through possible solutions. Look through the Campus Food Systems Project’s resources and
blogs to find inspiration from other campuses, and research what opportunities and solutions
exist in your community to help you overcome any challenges
Distributors
Sure, big distributors like Sysco and Gordon Food Service bring food from very far away to your campus.
But chances are pretty good that they’re also distributing some local products too. It’s also pretty likely
that they are bringing additional local products, if they know it is a priority for your campus. Sitting
down with them (and ideally, with your food service team to back you up) to show that your campus
wants to change where food is coming from and how it is produced, can yield some impressive results.
There are also smaller distributors who can help your campus achieve its local, sustainable and
equitable purchasing goals. Instead of delving into the unknowns of a large supply chain, a distributor
in southern Ontario prides itself on a different approach. “At 100km Foods Inc. we want you to know
where your food comes from... We aim to foster and grow authentic and genuine relationships between
our customers and our producers.”
Ryerson University and the University of Toronto both work with 100km foods to purchase many of
their local products including: fresh, harvested-to-order, in-season fruits and vegetables, farm-fresh
dairy, free-run eggs, artisanally milled grains and flours, and pantry staples like Ontario maple syrup,
honey and dried beans. This ensures that they are supporting local and sustainable foods, while still
maintaining quality and satisfaction.

8. Applied Student Research Toolkit 8
Questions to Consider
Here are some general questions to discuss with your food service provider and existing distributors.
Campus Policies
• Does your campus or Food Service Provider have policies or statements that support
ecological and just practices and the local community? Are students in support of local and
sustainable purchasing? If we don’t know, could we find out?
Current Purchasing Questions
• Does our campus already purchase from local suppliers?
• Do we have a definition for local?
• Where is our food coming from? Does our food purchaser or distributor have tracking
mechanisms to show where our food is coming from and how it is produced?
• Can we highlight the local products we already procure? Can we label ingredients in our
cafeterias?
• What distributors is our campus working with? Can our big distributors help us get local
food? What about smaller distributors or farmer co-ops? Can we buy directly from local
producers?
Local Food Procurement
• What specific certifications does our food service provider and/or distributor require from
producers (e.g. food safety certifications)? Can we work with local producers to help them to
understand and possibly obtain these certifications?
• What are other campuses doing nearby? Is it possible to be purchasing more local,
sustainable and just food?
Cost Savings
• If buying local and sustainable food costs more, can we shift food purchasing budgets and
meal pricing to balance out these costs? Will students pay more? If not, could we try to find
operational efficiencies in other areas of operations-- for example, waste reduction through
trayless dining or other methods (see a great example from the University of Texas at Austin),
energy efficiency through retrofits or behaviour-change programs? Could we put those
savings towards higher ingredient costs?
Upcoming Opportunities
• Is there an upcoming Request for Proposal for Food Services or Distributors? How can we
integrate an increase in local, sustainable, healthy and just food options?
• Are there events in which we could integrate local food?
• Are there upcoming meetings with distributors and suppliers to discuss these questions?

9. Applied Student Research Toolkit 9
Supporting Documents and Case Studies
Here are a few more resources to inspire your team. These resources provide greater insight on
purchasing baseline assessments and highlight examples from leading campuses.
My Sustainable Canada’s: Conducting Food Origin Audits: a step-by-step guide
The food origin audit guide was designed for healthcare facilities, but can be easily used in a
Campus setting. This guide will help in examining procurement of local, organic, fair-trade and even
non-food items and supplies. It will also help in determining points for intervention and opportunities
to increase the procurement of local food.
Middlebury College - Mapping Out the Food We Eat
If you decide to go ahead and do a Purchasing Baseline, or any similar project that tracks where
specific food at your campus comes from on a purchase by purchase basis, you’re going to end up
with a lot of data that you worked really hard to gather. This is a great example of what you could
do with that data: map it out using Google Maps! It’s also a good example of how you could do it—
working with a class of geography, environmental studies, or even computer science students is a
great way to save yourself time, get the skills needed, and get more people interested and invested
in the results.
Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project - 10 Easy Ways to Incorporate Local Into Your Cafeteria
Public Good Initiative - “Report on Food Procurement”
This report is the result of research that students at University of Toronto just did for the Campus
Food Systems Project in winter 2012, on best practice models for local purchasing policies.